LJ Idol: "Walls"
Billy? Billy, co'mere and listen to your sad old granny tell you a story. A damn fine story, I'd say. Better than that bunk they're throwing at'cha on Tee Vee these days. You know I didn't have a Tee Vee until I was ninety-two. Ninety-two! You know how old that is? Course you don't.
Where are my glasses? I can't see yer face.
Anyway.
This is the tale of Wallpuncher McBismuth, the biggest, meanest, loudest, smelliest, most vile lumberjack this side of forever. I'm not one for tall tales, mind you, Billy, but this mother-cruster had one helluva legacy back home. I bet the women there in their 30's still remember ol' Wall fightin' Big Luey out in the Pacific, even though he stopped all that 40 years ago. Hell, I bet somewhere in your tiny brain there's a little spark of his memory just itchin' to make an impression on you. After all, your granny knew him better than all the men and women in the world. There's a little bit of him in you yet, sonny. Anyway, let's start at the beginning and see how much of his story I can fit into your little head before bedtime, eh?
I met him when he was smaller than a chihuahua pup, and just crawled outta his mama's corpse beside a cactus. He was a tiny thing, but me and your pappy took him into our little hutch out in the desert and wrapped him in a wool blanket and fed him fresh goat milk. We didn't have any kids of our own at the time, so we took a liking to him rather quickly, and when his daddy came round lookin' for his son, your pappy shot him right in the face with Ol' Rusty and little Wall just laughed and laughed. We knew then he was a keeper.
When he was a week old he learned to walk and within a month he was three feet tall and climbing trees. Our neighbors three miles over thought there was something mighty suspicious about it, but we didn't care. He was ours.
One morning when he was just under a year old and just over 6 feet tall with an inch of stubble, I went into Wall's room and there was no wall left. He had punched clean through and made eight horses out of dirt and was riding them away into oblivion itself. I thought we had lost him, but in the evening as I was crying into your pappy's lap, Wallpuncher rode up with a skinned cow in each hand and a five foot tall hat made of asparagus and cooked it all on the fire left on the trail he came blazin' in on.
That night we all shat boulders.
This went on for a few years, until Wall was twelve feet tall and it took me a month to wash his hair. He decided at that point that he wanted to go west to Oregon and become a lumberjack. Well, Billy, I'll tell you right now that I was worried. Oregon was rough country back in those days, rougher than anything Wallpuncher had even seen, and trust me, boy, he had seen a lot.
You ever see a ball of snakes seven hundred feet wide in a pool of venom that would rival lake Utah? Yeah.
Anyway, your pappy thought it might be the best thing for Wall to go out west and find his calling among the sap and splinters because by then we had a child of our own--that'd be your ma--and we didn't want her accidentally sat on or eaten by Wallpuncher in one of his rages that could blind Zeus. She was kind of a sickly thing, to top it off, and I think Wall wanted to help her out by brining back money some day. So your pappy gave Wall a shovel and a pickaxe and a bottle of rum and a herd of cattle for food along the journey, and we saw him off one fine May morning. I cried my heart out but Wallpuncher just handed it back to me and said, "Maw-maw, don't worry yer head. I'ma make us a fat load of money fer the babe and we'll live in happiness fer the rest of yer days."
And with that, he strung the fifty cattle over his shoulder and was off faster than cats on critters.
Now, the rest of the story might sound crazy, but I swear to God it's the absolute truth. You listenin', Billy? TRUTH. Now gimme back my glass eye, don't get it all gummed up like that.
Wallpuncher took two minutes to get to Oregon from the southwest deserts we called home, and that was including goin' up the Rockies for a little sight-seeing. Word is that once he made it to the redwood forests and all, every single lumberjack gave him his axe. They all heard the rumble in the earth and the trees shiftin' as he came crashing down from the Rockies, and when he showed up they all sat down and smoked together, laughing nervously. Wallpuncher didn't know how to smoke on account of being raised by clean folk like us, but he wanted to fit in so he picked up a five thousand year old redwood like it was a toothpick and lit it on fire with the backside of a bear run against the ground.
Paul Bunyan heard Wallpuncher McBismuth a-puffin' on that redwood cigar and shat himself right then and there.
Like I said, the lumberjacks all gave Wall their axes and saws and skinnin' knives and the like, and he took 'em and mushed 'em up like clay--no, not like play-dough, Billy, play-dough didn't exist back then so shut yer trap--he mushed 'em up like clay and said, "These ain't sharp enough fer me. I gotta get an axe sharp enough to cut down enough trees so's I can bring back some money to mah family." Naturally most of the lumberjacks had families they were supportin' fine with the axes they were using but nobody wanted to argue with Wallpuncher McBismuth who was twelve feet tall and looked like a god's nightmare. They thought about it for a while and eventually decided the only way Wallpuncher could find a blade strong enough to cut trees as fast as he wanted was to swim to the bottom of the Pacific ocean and grind his steel against the belly of the earth.
Well, Wallpuncher thought this was a fabulous idea but he realized a fatal flaw. "How am I supposed to keep warm down there?" he asked them, pointin' at his worn khaki shorts and linen shirt.
The lumberjacks all thought about it for a while, but Wallpuncher got tired of waiting real quick; he grabbed each lumberjack's nice plaid shirt and warm wool pants and nice silk longjohns brought by boat all the way from China. He took them right off their bodies and ripped them up and stuck them back together (I taught him how to sew with he was a few months old) in less than a second and all the lumberjacks sat there buck naked and confused and realized they had no way to make a living now, and there was no way they could go back home without anything on their bare bodies.
And that's why there are nudists, Billy.
Wall gathered up all the mushy clay steel and waved goodbye to the naked, bewildered lumberjacks. He walked real slow out to the ocean and realized that even if he sharpened all this steel on the belly of the earth there wasn't enough of it. So he walked on over real slow into town and waited at the train tracks. Eventually he heard the roar and whistle of an oncoming train, and he sat right there in the tracks and stared it down. He had a helluva stare, let me tell you! The train engineer didn't have to do anything to make the train stop: the train itself got scared shitless and fell off the tracks, shaking. Wallpuncher picked it up in one hand and shook all the people out. When it looked clear inside (for as nasty as he was, he didn't wanna hurt anybody really), he took that train and smashed it flat in his hands! The engineer didn't even care, it was such an impressive sight. Wallpuncher politely bowed and tucked the train metal until his arm and went back to the coast.
And so Wallpuncher McBismuth took to the waters. He went straight down at 7,000 miles-an-hour and hit what he thought was a rock. Before he had time to look at what it was it pushed up back at him at 7,000 miles-an-hour and they both flew into the bright blue air above the deep blue Pacific. Wallpuncher didn't look but just grappled the thing and tried to rip it apart with arms that could rip whales in half, but this wasn't a whale. He kicked at it with legs that could kick mountains through the earth to Mongolia, but this wasn't a mountain. He bit at it with teeth that could tear through steel like steak, but this wasn't steel.
He punched it with his fists that could punch through a hundred miles of worth of titanium wall in a single punch, but this wasn't a wall he was punching at.
Wallpuncher McBismuth was fighting with the biggest, meanest, loudest, smelliest, most vile lobster this side of forever.
Once he realized what he was dealing with, Wall still had no idea how he was gonna tame this beast and bring it to justice. He had never dealt with crustaceans before, being from the desert, but he knew how to wrestle a scorpion. Well, the lobster (whose name was Big Luey) thrashed around and Wallpuncher thrashed around and the two of them thrashed up and down the West Coast for ten years. People would travel out to the beaches with their binoculars to come see the fight, and root for whoever they wanted to win (they usually rooted for Wallpuncher on account of he would probably hear them if they were makin' fun of him). Hell, I even went down with your pappy and your ma and we sat on the beach with a striped umbrella and lots of wet sand, and we'd tell your ma, "That's your brother out there!"
Ten years this went on, and Wallpuncher and Big Luey got so riled up they eventually started hurricanes out in the Pacific. One of these hurricanes was so big and bad that it managed to pull Wallpuncher and Big Luey apart, and they flew five hundred miles away from each other out in the middle of the ocean. Now, you might think this is the end of the story, and Wallpuncher just swam to shore and went on his job as a lumberjack, but you'd be mighty stupid to think either of them would give up that easy. No sir, Wallpuncher McBismuth was determined to smash Big Luey into lobster bisque.
So Wallpuncher thought, "I've got a chance to sharpen my axe now!" and swam back to where he first dove in. He found the lumberjacks' ball of steel and the hunk of train and proceeded to mold and carve it into the finest axe you ever seen (not that you've seen any axes, Billy. What? Why are you talking about guitars, sonny?). He warped that steel so fast it was hot lava under the ocean, and then he struck it so hard against the cold hard underbelly of the world that it froze solid with the sharpest edge since God perfected wit. Wallpuncher held up his axe blade and smiled. It was nine feet wide and came down to an atom's width at the edge.
He reached up out of the Pacific and grabbed one of those redwood trees without even coming up to take a breath. He ran the axe blade along it with a few quick swipes and mashed the two together. Wallpuncher McBismuth had forged his weapon.
Now, I told you that Big Luey wasn't a quitter either, and I wasn't lying. This whole time Wall was working on his axe, this huge nasty critter the size of New York City was crawling along the ocean floor sniffing out the ol' lumberjack. As soon as Wallpuncher was done, Big Luey found him and jumped on him from behind.
Well, that was dumb.
Wallpuncher McBismuth spun around with fury in his eyes and struck Big Luey right in the stomach and sliced him clear in half. He hit so hard and fast that Big Luey burst into flames right under water, and shot straight up towards the moon. All the people back on the shore saw this backwards comet going clear through the sky and knew Wall had won.
And they would've been right, but sometimes life forgets who the hero is. Wallpuncher's axe melted down when he sliced through Big Luey, and the big old lumberjack started crying. He cried and cried as Big Luey went flying up into space because his axe was stuck in there. He cried so hard you could hear him on the East Coast. He cried so hard I could feel it in my bones as I sat back home in the desert feeding your ma.
You know Billy, before Wallpuncher McBismuth cried, the oceans were all freshwater.
We know he stopped crying eventually because nobody hears him crying anymore. Maybe he finally realized that it was silly to cry over an axe made of steel taken from a bunch of lumberjacks and a passenger train. Maybe he realized he could find another axe, and went quietly into Canada to cut down trees. Maybe he realized there wasn't any reason for him to come home to us because we were just normal folk trying to live a normal life, and so he didn't have to do anything for us after all.
Maybe he just drowned after a while. After all, Wallpuncher McBismuth was only human.
------------
This entry is for Week 22 of LJ Idol, topic "Walls". The idea came from my friend Sam, who yelled "WALLPUNCHER MCBISMUTH" at me, and who also helped edit. A few bits here and there are my boyfriend Andrew's, but the writing is all me. I wanted to do something really outside the box for this, I hope you enjoyed it. I tip my hat to Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.
Where are my glasses? I can't see yer face.
Anyway.
This is the tale of Wallpuncher McBismuth, the biggest, meanest, loudest, smelliest, most vile lumberjack this side of forever. I'm not one for tall tales, mind you, Billy, but this mother-cruster had one helluva legacy back home. I bet the women there in their 30's still remember ol' Wall fightin' Big Luey out in the Pacific, even though he stopped all that 40 years ago. Hell, I bet somewhere in your tiny brain there's a little spark of his memory just itchin' to make an impression on you. After all, your granny knew him better than all the men and women in the world. There's a little bit of him in you yet, sonny. Anyway, let's start at the beginning and see how much of his story I can fit into your little head before bedtime, eh?
I met him when he was smaller than a chihuahua pup, and just crawled outta his mama's corpse beside a cactus. He was a tiny thing, but me and your pappy took him into our little hutch out in the desert and wrapped him in a wool blanket and fed him fresh goat milk. We didn't have any kids of our own at the time, so we took a liking to him rather quickly, and when his daddy came round lookin' for his son, your pappy shot him right in the face with Ol' Rusty and little Wall just laughed and laughed. We knew then he was a keeper.
When he was a week old he learned to walk and within a month he was three feet tall and climbing trees. Our neighbors three miles over thought there was something mighty suspicious about it, but we didn't care. He was ours.
One morning when he was just under a year old and just over 6 feet tall with an inch of stubble, I went into Wall's room and there was no wall left. He had punched clean through and made eight horses out of dirt and was riding them away into oblivion itself. I thought we had lost him, but in the evening as I was crying into your pappy's lap, Wallpuncher rode up with a skinned cow in each hand and a five foot tall hat made of asparagus and cooked it all on the fire left on the trail he came blazin' in on.
That night we all shat boulders.
This went on for a few years, until Wall was twelve feet tall and it took me a month to wash his hair. He decided at that point that he wanted to go west to Oregon and become a lumberjack. Well, Billy, I'll tell you right now that I was worried. Oregon was rough country back in those days, rougher than anything Wallpuncher had even seen, and trust me, boy, he had seen a lot.
You ever see a ball of snakes seven hundred feet wide in a pool of venom that would rival lake Utah? Yeah.
Anyway, your pappy thought it might be the best thing for Wall to go out west and find his calling among the sap and splinters because by then we had a child of our own--that'd be your ma--and we didn't want her accidentally sat on or eaten by Wallpuncher in one of his rages that could blind Zeus. She was kind of a sickly thing, to top it off, and I think Wall wanted to help her out by brining back money some day. So your pappy gave Wall a shovel and a pickaxe and a bottle of rum and a herd of cattle for food along the journey, and we saw him off one fine May morning. I cried my heart out but Wallpuncher just handed it back to me and said, "Maw-maw, don't worry yer head. I'ma make us a fat load of money fer the babe and we'll live in happiness fer the rest of yer days."
And with that, he strung the fifty cattle over his shoulder and was off faster than cats on critters.
Now, the rest of the story might sound crazy, but I swear to God it's the absolute truth. You listenin', Billy? TRUTH. Now gimme back my glass eye, don't get it all gummed up like that.
Wallpuncher took two minutes to get to Oregon from the southwest deserts we called home, and that was including goin' up the Rockies for a little sight-seeing. Word is that once he made it to the redwood forests and all, every single lumberjack gave him his axe. They all heard the rumble in the earth and the trees shiftin' as he came crashing down from the Rockies, and when he showed up they all sat down and smoked together, laughing nervously. Wallpuncher didn't know how to smoke on account of being raised by clean folk like us, but he wanted to fit in so he picked up a five thousand year old redwood like it was a toothpick and lit it on fire with the backside of a bear run against the ground.
Paul Bunyan heard Wallpuncher McBismuth a-puffin' on that redwood cigar and shat himself right then and there.
Like I said, the lumberjacks all gave Wall their axes and saws and skinnin' knives and the like, and he took 'em and mushed 'em up like clay--no, not like play-dough, Billy, play-dough didn't exist back then so shut yer trap--he mushed 'em up like clay and said, "These ain't sharp enough fer me. I gotta get an axe sharp enough to cut down enough trees so's I can bring back some money to mah family." Naturally most of the lumberjacks had families they were supportin' fine with the axes they were using but nobody wanted to argue with Wallpuncher McBismuth who was twelve feet tall and looked like a god's nightmare. They thought about it for a while and eventually decided the only way Wallpuncher could find a blade strong enough to cut trees as fast as he wanted was to swim to the bottom of the Pacific ocean and grind his steel against the belly of the earth.
Well, Wallpuncher thought this was a fabulous idea but he realized a fatal flaw. "How am I supposed to keep warm down there?" he asked them, pointin' at his worn khaki shorts and linen shirt.
The lumberjacks all thought about it for a while, but Wallpuncher got tired of waiting real quick; he grabbed each lumberjack's nice plaid shirt and warm wool pants and nice silk longjohns brought by boat all the way from China. He took them right off their bodies and ripped them up and stuck them back together (I taught him how to sew with he was a few months old) in less than a second and all the lumberjacks sat there buck naked and confused and realized they had no way to make a living now, and there was no way they could go back home without anything on their bare bodies.
And that's why there are nudists, Billy.
Wall gathered up all the mushy clay steel and waved goodbye to the naked, bewildered lumberjacks. He walked real slow out to the ocean and realized that even if he sharpened all this steel on the belly of the earth there wasn't enough of it. So he walked on over real slow into town and waited at the train tracks. Eventually he heard the roar and whistle of an oncoming train, and he sat right there in the tracks and stared it down. He had a helluva stare, let me tell you! The train engineer didn't have to do anything to make the train stop: the train itself got scared shitless and fell off the tracks, shaking. Wallpuncher picked it up in one hand and shook all the people out. When it looked clear inside (for as nasty as he was, he didn't wanna hurt anybody really), he took that train and smashed it flat in his hands! The engineer didn't even care, it was such an impressive sight. Wallpuncher politely bowed and tucked the train metal until his arm and went back to the coast.
And so Wallpuncher McBismuth took to the waters. He went straight down at 7,000 miles-an-hour and hit what he thought was a rock. Before he had time to look at what it was it pushed up back at him at 7,000 miles-an-hour and they both flew into the bright blue air above the deep blue Pacific. Wallpuncher didn't look but just grappled the thing and tried to rip it apart with arms that could rip whales in half, but this wasn't a whale. He kicked at it with legs that could kick mountains through the earth to Mongolia, but this wasn't a mountain. He bit at it with teeth that could tear through steel like steak, but this wasn't steel.
He punched it with his fists that could punch through a hundred miles of worth of titanium wall in a single punch, but this wasn't a wall he was punching at.
Wallpuncher McBismuth was fighting with the biggest, meanest, loudest, smelliest, most vile lobster this side of forever.
Once he realized what he was dealing with, Wall still had no idea how he was gonna tame this beast and bring it to justice. He had never dealt with crustaceans before, being from the desert, but he knew how to wrestle a scorpion. Well, the lobster (whose name was Big Luey) thrashed around and Wallpuncher thrashed around and the two of them thrashed up and down the West Coast for ten years. People would travel out to the beaches with their binoculars to come see the fight, and root for whoever they wanted to win (they usually rooted for Wallpuncher on account of he would probably hear them if they were makin' fun of him). Hell, I even went down with your pappy and your ma and we sat on the beach with a striped umbrella and lots of wet sand, and we'd tell your ma, "That's your brother out there!"
Ten years this went on, and Wallpuncher and Big Luey got so riled up they eventually started hurricanes out in the Pacific. One of these hurricanes was so big and bad that it managed to pull Wallpuncher and Big Luey apart, and they flew five hundred miles away from each other out in the middle of the ocean. Now, you might think this is the end of the story, and Wallpuncher just swam to shore and went on his job as a lumberjack, but you'd be mighty stupid to think either of them would give up that easy. No sir, Wallpuncher McBismuth was determined to smash Big Luey into lobster bisque.
So Wallpuncher thought, "I've got a chance to sharpen my axe now!" and swam back to where he first dove in. He found the lumberjacks' ball of steel and the hunk of train and proceeded to mold and carve it into the finest axe you ever seen (not that you've seen any axes, Billy. What? Why are you talking about guitars, sonny?). He warped that steel so fast it was hot lava under the ocean, and then he struck it so hard against the cold hard underbelly of the world that it froze solid with the sharpest edge since God perfected wit. Wallpuncher held up his axe blade and smiled. It was nine feet wide and came down to an atom's width at the edge.
He reached up out of the Pacific and grabbed one of those redwood trees without even coming up to take a breath. He ran the axe blade along it with a few quick swipes and mashed the two together. Wallpuncher McBismuth had forged his weapon.
Now, I told you that Big Luey wasn't a quitter either, and I wasn't lying. This whole time Wall was working on his axe, this huge nasty critter the size of New York City was crawling along the ocean floor sniffing out the ol' lumberjack. As soon as Wallpuncher was done, Big Luey found him and jumped on him from behind.
Well, that was dumb.
Wallpuncher McBismuth spun around with fury in his eyes and struck Big Luey right in the stomach and sliced him clear in half. He hit so hard and fast that Big Luey burst into flames right under water, and shot straight up towards the moon. All the people back on the shore saw this backwards comet going clear through the sky and knew Wall had won.
And they would've been right, but sometimes life forgets who the hero is. Wallpuncher's axe melted down when he sliced through Big Luey, and the big old lumberjack started crying. He cried and cried as Big Luey went flying up into space because his axe was stuck in there. He cried so hard you could hear him on the East Coast. He cried so hard I could feel it in my bones as I sat back home in the desert feeding your ma.
You know Billy, before Wallpuncher McBismuth cried, the oceans were all freshwater.
We know he stopped crying eventually because nobody hears him crying anymore. Maybe he finally realized that it was silly to cry over an axe made of steel taken from a bunch of lumberjacks and a passenger train. Maybe he realized he could find another axe, and went quietly into Canada to cut down trees. Maybe he realized there wasn't any reason for him to come home to us because we were just normal folk trying to live a normal life, and so he didn't have to do anything for us after all.
Maybe he just drowned after a while. After all, Wallpuncher McBismuth was only human.
------------
This entry is for Week 22 of LJ Idol, topic "Walls". The idea came from my friend Sam, who yelled "WALLPUNCHER MCBISMUTH" at me, and who also helped edit. A few bits here and there are my boyfriend Andrew's, but the writing is all me. I wanted to do something really outside the box for this, I hope you enjoyed it. I tip my hat to Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.